Saturday, June 26, 2010

Perhaps nominated (never underestimate the power of our fine conglomerates) but never elected. The Academy has a large contingent of actors, and most would sooner tear out their fingernails than grant an Oscar to a thespian performing only with his vocal chords.

But along with voice acting, there's the issue of emoting via mo cap:

... The onslaught of award-winning motion capture has presented us with a more realistic possibility of an Oscar-nominated performance. I strongly believe Zoe Saldana was snubbed by last year’s Academy Awards when she was not nominated for Best Actress. ...

Don't think so. Journalists have this idea that there's "animation" done by artistic nerds called "animators", and then there's this new technology called "motion capture," where actors in wired nylon leotards drive the performances.

Animators, of course, are heavily involved in both disciplines and technologies, despite the denials of various high-powered film directors.

If you're going to give a little golden man to an actress for motion capture, you should probably hand out duplicate statuettes to the people hunched over their computers, tweaking and polishing her performance.

2
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Actually, there was some brief columnist gushing (mostly on the West Coast half of the voting, where they always do it, and looked rather like this one) to wonder whether Patton Oswalt would qualify as Actor for "Ratatouille"...Again, not so much on merit, but as another toe-in-the-door excuse to sneak that year's Pixar out of the BAF's into the majors, as this was years before Wall-E legitimized the whole push.(Tellin' ya, they're not going to give up...) :)

As for the article, yes, Avatar's Saldana was passed over for acting...So, in fact, was every single other member of the cast--May we consider that a slight HINT?

I imagine there are exceptions to this: "The Academy has a large contingent of actors, and most would sooner tear out their fingernails than grant an Oscar to a thespian performing only with his vocal chords."

For one... it would depend upon whether or not the Voice Actor was also an on camera actor. And another thing that could make it an exception would be the notability of the piece the voice actor was in.